Most sane people do not edit code in the terminal.

Nevertheless, there exist many large communities centered around editing text and code in the terminal.

Whether you'd want to do it out of necessity, convenience, or to feel professional, choosing the right one can be difficult, and you'll find yourself jumping around difference editors.

This guide is here to help you choose the one to learn, so you can stick with it until you reach master fluency.

We'll go from most popular to least popular.

Neovim

As of right now, Neovim is really the most matrue, widely adopted and actively maintained terminal IDE. It is easily extensible thanks to its Lua configuration scheme, allowing users to plug-and-play with ease.

If you want to head into Neovim, I suggest the AstroNvim distribution. It's pretty well maintained as of September 2025, and has everything you'd ever need, with actually sensible keybinds.

I don't suggest NvChad because it's a bit too opinionated and niche for me, and had me tinkering with the configs too much.

I don't suggest LazyVim either, unless you want to feel like you're building your own text editor.

Vim

I used to be a classic Vim purist, okay? But as much as I miss the one-file simple vimscript configuration I had going on with Vim, I have to say that classic Vim has a lot left to desire, which Neovim provides.

Emacs

Too slow. Not ergonomic. Hassle to set up. Too graphical.

Doom Emacs

Improvement on Emacs on every front, especially with EVIL mode, which allows you to bring Vi modal editing to Emacs, giving you the best of both worlds.

But the reason I still don't use Doom Emacs is because I think a text editor shouldn't have to be this complex. Literally the opposite of the UNIX philosophy.

GNU Nano

It's nice that Nano is pre-installed on most UNIX-adjacent systems, but installign anything else will be a better experience.

Micro

It's like Nano, but actually good! Like, you can actually program in Micro. And the keybinds will be very familiar for people coming from graphical text editors.

Helix

I want to love Helix, I really do. It definitely feels way faster to use compared to Neovim, but it doesn't live up to its promise of requiring little to no configuration. If anything, AstroNvim does it better.

Bonus: Zed

Although not a Terminal Editor, it's just so underrated. Like the VS Code alternative that the world desperately needed. It's not Electron-based (thankfully), comes with excellent language support, and has really extensive support for connecting to LLMs to help you code.

Other nice features are:

• Real-time multiplayer editing
• Vim & Helix modes
• Rust-speed
• Open-source
• Clean and beautiful UI

I hope this guide helped you choose your new favorite editor!